Mortal

 Here I am drinking beer in the back yard, late afternoon on a warm day in October. I've got 22 minutes until sundown, which might be kind of a metaphor for treasuring warmth and light on the way to a COVID winter. 

I've been a little freaked out this week by dead birds. Specifically a perfectly formed but stone-cold dead sparrow that was lying on my back steps Tuesday afternoon when my daughter and I left the house. We hurried on to the garage, only to discover that the automatic garage door opener was not working. Fortunately it had only been a couple months since I'd unwedged the service door from whatever it had been stuck on for a couple years, so I was able to go inside and raise the door. When I came back home, alone, I picked up the dead bird with a plastic grocery bag and deposited it in the empty garbage cart out back. It clunked when it hit the bottom. I also called the garage door repair company, using the number on the well-worn sticker on the pegboard inside the garage.

So the broken gear in the opener was fixed on Wednesday morning. All should have been well. 

This afternoon I brought my laptop outside to do some writing in the fall sunshine and the seventy-degree weather. I went to pull a chair up to the table and a bird, a sparrow, lying on its back twitched out from underneath the chair frame. It was paralyzed on one side, helpless, breathing, and struggling to move. I went inside for a few minutes, came back out, looked again. The bird seemed still, dead. I thought, because I had seen it alive, it was too sacred to pick up with a plastic grocery bag and drop into the trash. So I got a shovel from the garage and dug a hole near the forsythia bush, working my way through some tough roots to go six or even eight inches down. I went back to pick up the bird with the shovel — I'm sadly squeamish. I cannot tenderly pick up the creature in my own naked hands, despite last week reading a lovely nature writer's story about holding such a dead bird in her tender hands. I scraped the shove on the pavement and the bird moved again, twitched across the patio a few inches, frightened or reflexively enlivened by the sound, the action, the threat.

I know this bird will die. But I couldn't think of burying it alive. I know that a country person, a person with a better heart for animals, someone else — would know how to kill it, how to put it out of its misery. But what to do? Smash it with the shovel? I imagined how awful the smashed bird would look. I imagined it not dying even then and me needing to smash it again and again. 

So I left it. I sat down to do my work, talk on the phone, drink my beer with the dying sparrow just beyond my peripheral vision. I made one more attempt with the shovel about twenty minutes ago, but again the sparrow had enough life, enough movement to skitter and flip a fewinches across the patio into the dirt. It may be breathing still, even now — though perhaps I'm done with looking. 

God's eye is on that sparrow. 

I guess I'm there, too, though only in God's peripheral vision. Mortal, yet so uncomfortable with mortality. 

Parking place

I've been caught in dreams lately in which I cannot find my car, cannot return to where my car is parked. I'm going up and down streets parked solid with vehicles that are not mine, with a sense that my glacier blue Honda CRV should be where I think I've left it, and yet I can't find it. The streets are near places I went late at night with fellow theatre people after shows in the early 80's. Or I'm on streets near the high school where I dropped off and picked up my kids a dozen or more years ago. Those kids are waiting on corners for me, Kurt in one dream, Eliza with Kris in another. But I can't do what they're expecting of me, can't make it work. 

This morning, as I whirled through the bathroom, putting in contacts, pushing my hair back into place, almost late for a coffee date with a friend, it hit me. Those dreams are about chaos. 

In other words, 2020.

I'm taking a few necessary days off from work, to slow down, think my own thoughts and clear out stuff from my home. Yesterday I cleaned the garage and filled the garbage can with junk and dirt and stuff bought fifteen years ago to fix twenty-year-old problems. There's an old bicycle and an old push lawnmower out by the garbage cans which I expect will disappear on Sunday or Monday, before the regular collection day on Tuesday. One man's junk is another man's garbage-picking prize or something else to add to the pile of scrap metal that can be turned into cash and used for rent and groceries. 

There's less than a month left before the election, and it's twelve weeks beyond that, I believe, until Inauguration Day. Then, I hope, with new leadership in Washington, we start to pick up the pieces and set things right after the four-year tornado of the present administration. I'll be dropping off my ballot in the next few days (vote yes for the Fair Tax in Illinois!) and then phone-banking this weekend to encourage Wisconsin voters to get those ballots in early. 

In the meanwhile, there's beautiful fall weather, golden orange and still-green in bold contrast to deeply blue skies. Warm afternoons in the sun this week, and early mornings and early evenings cool enough for wool and fleece and hats. 

The earth goes on. The trees stayed rooted in the parkway. I don't have to look for them to find comfort. The birds and squirrels, bees and butterflies go about their business. Yesterday a red-headed woodpecker made a brief visit to my patio, close to where I sat -- like I was seeing it stuffed in a museum case. It was a young bird, still spotted in places and tried to perch on the metal pole that holds up my grape vine. It's rusty enough to look like bark. The bird slipped a bit down the pole, then quickly flew away. 

It is hard to stay rooted, hard to stay grounded in these pandemic days.  So many things look the same in substance but are different in how we allow ourselves to live them. Restaurants, choirs, shopping, baseball games--nothing is the same. Snatched up by chaos, dislocated by the virus, whirled into confusion by the all-day onslaught of crazy news,  I can't find where I parked my car. I'm not even sure where to find myself.

I close my eyes and breathe, cool fingers held to my face. Shielded thus, I search for reverence -- another word for gratitude according to Diane Butler Bass. What is sacred on this day? Where is God — and God's greater and more graceful world — breaking in around the edges?  That is where I will make my home. I'll park my car. I'll be able to find it again.